


sleep alone

by piggy09



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Gen, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-09 03:07:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17993687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Trent Ikithon takes many things away from Luke, but he can’t take the most important thing – because Luke’s mama is already gone. Before Trent. Before the Academy, before Papa vanishing into his workshop for hours and hours and emerging purple-grey and shaking – before that, Luke’s mama got taken away. They were with the goblins, and she saidbe a clever boy and run, Luke,and she kissed his forehead, and he doesn’t remember anything else. He’s tried.(Or: the self-indulgent and confusing “what if Caleb was actually Luke coming back from the future to fix things” AU that probably no one asked for or even really considered. But I thought of itandconsidered it, so here it is.)





	sleep alone

**Author's Note:**

> BACK AT IT AGAIN AT THE KRISPY KREME*
> 
> *writing high-concept AUs that are just about how much I love Caleb and Nott
> 
> I looked at CR transcripts for some of this, but couldn't find transcripts for more recent episodes so a lot of this is me vaguely remembering how things went and doing my best. If I messed something up real bad, please let me know!

Trent Ikithon takes many things away from Luke, but he can’t take the most important thing – because Luke’s mama is already gone. Before Trent. Before the Academy, before Papa vanishing into his workshop for hours and hours and emerging purple-grey and shaking – before that, Luke’s mama got taken away. They were with the goblins, and she said _be a clever boy and run, Luke_ , and she kissed his forehead, and he doesn’t remember anything else. He’s tried. Every time the pain stops being bearable, he tries—

 

 

 

 

 

 

And there’s nothing else there. They were with the goblins, and she said _be a clever boy and run, Luke_ , and she kissed his forehead. Nothing else left. There’s a hole in the center of his heart where his mama should be – where everything should be, all the ways that things went right. Hole in his heart and he can’t fix it. Can’t undo it. Dreams about undoing it, sometimes. During the wartimes. He imagines going all the way back and fixing it and knows, while imagining, that it’s impossible. Luke makes plains of fire rise from his hands, he makes time slow and stop into a shuddering glassy ocean, but he can’t go back. He can’t manage to go back.

 

Until he does.

* * *

He’s taking watch with Beau, and the sky is unbearable and vast, and Beau says: “Hey. You good?”

He turns his head to look at her. She’s staring at a point in the distance; she won’t turn her head to look at him. One of her hands is pushing a bracer back and forth. One of her legs is jittering underneath her in the dirt.

“Why would I not be good,” he says.

“I don’t know,” Beau says. “You almost died. Nott almost died. And you guys have that whole – fucked-up codependency thing going on, you know?” She exhales a scoffing breath through her teeth. “I was just _checking_. It’s not a big deal, forget I said anything. Fuck.”

And they both had. They’d almost died. Caleb woke up to the mint-tingle of Jester’s magic snapping his veins back together and he’d looked over and his mama was a tangle of green-grey limbs on the ground and he’d—

(They were with the goblins, and she said _be a clever boy and run, Luke_ , and she—)

“Oh,” he says. “Yes. I, I’m glad that we both survived. Thank you for asking, Beauregard.”

Beau makes a dismissive _nneh_ noise at the concept of caring about someone else’s feelings; she rolls her neck from side to side, and some of her muscles crack. “I get it,” she says to that fixed point in the dark. “Like, before I met you guys, there wasn’t really – like, you know, I didn’t have – but, yeah. When you and Nott hit the dirt I, like, freaked out, so I was like _oh, if I freaked out I bet Caleb_ super _freaked out,_ and…yeah, so.”

He swims through the ocean of Beau’s obfuscation. He says: “There wasn’t anyone who…”

“Nah,” Beau says. “My dad’s a douche, and my mom…” she lifts a shoulder in a shrug. “Not to make this, like, Beau’s feelings hour or whatever. Like. Sorry. Don’t want to complain about my family when you’re…fuck, that’s shitty. _Fuck_.”

Caleb turns his head to the side and watches his mama asleep: a curled-up heap, like a discarded skin. He’s sent Frumpkin to cuddle up with her. _Keep her safe_ , he tells Frumpkin for the thousandth time. Frumpkin gives him a warm, amused wave of understanding; he curls up tighter and lets Caleb’s mama dig her sharp green fingers into his side. She burbles in her sleep. Her eyelashes, long and thick, flutter in the firelight.

“It is not shitty,” he says. “I understand.”

“Sometimes I just…” Beau says. “Sometimes I just wish I had what you and Nott have, and if you tell anyone that I will break your scrawny neck like a twig, I swear.”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

“You’d better not,” Beau mutters. The fire shoot sparks into the night.

* * *

And Luke had read enough about this sort of magic to know that you could only do it once. This magic carves out the center of your chest; you can’t come back from it.

When he thinks about it later, the spell, he’ll remember: the cracked skin of his hands bleeding, the way the spell broke his ribcage open like a fishhook slung by a god. He’ll remember reaching his hands towards some imagined sun.

They were with the goblins, and she said—

* * *

Luke’s mama is a three-foot-tall drunken goblin. She’s reeling around their shared prison cell, shouting at the walls about how her imprisonment was a mistake; she is banging her goblin hands against the wall, slurring curse words and threats. Luke’s heartbeat lives in his palms. He thinks _mama mama mama mama_ with an intense and terrified helplessness. She is so incredibly young; Luke’s age, not the age Luke’s papa was when he finally got tired enough to die. Luke could pick her up and carry her on his shoulders. He wants to fall down at her feet and cry.

Instead he clears his throat and says: “Hello. What’s your name?”

* * *

He doesn’t like people to touch him anymore, after Trent, after all of it, after all of those things, after every single one of those things he doesn’t like anyone to touch him anymore but when his mama does it, that’s alright. It’s alright. She hums under her breath as she braids flowers into his hair; he smells the comforting waft of stale whiskey float by his cheek.

“You’re going to look so beautiful, Caleb,” she says. The way she lilts his name: _Caaay-leb_. This name that is a gift he gave to himself and to her and to no one else. That name.

“Not as beautiful as you, surely,” he tells the palms of his hands.

His mama cackles. “Sweet talker,” she says fondly. Her sharp knotted hands gently give him another violet, another bloom of honeysuckle. She never gives him fire-colored flowers; this is love.

“You’re very good at this,” Caleb says. “This, this flower-braiding – thing. I mean.”

“Thanks,” she says. Her voice is strange and soft – when it gets like this, it’s almost like a memory. There was a time, when they first met, when Luke thought: _surely I’ll be able to know if she’s thinking about me, surely I’ll be able to feel it_. As it turns out, he can’t feel it. She might be thinking about her son, that other younger Luke. She might be thinking about nothing at all.

“I can do it for you,” he says. “Next, I mean, if you’d like.”

“Nah,” she says carelessly. “If there’s any flowers left over I’ll give ‘em to Yasha, she can put them in her book.” She pauses, picks up another flower, continues her gentle work. “There aren’t going to be any flowers left over, though.”

“Nott,” he says, “you picked an entire _armful_ of flowers.”

“ _Exactly_.” She finds another curl, somehow – more room, somehow. His ginger hair. It had surprised him, as he’d gotten older and his hair had turned that rich red; he’d thought it would be brown forever, just the way his mama had left him. There was a time, when they first met, when Luke thought: _surely she’ll see the color of my hair and she’ll know, she’ll remember, she’ll think of her own hair when she looks_. If his mama notices she keeps her own counsel. She’s never talked about the color, except to be complimentary.

“There,” she says, proud. “Done!” She falls back behind him on the bed of the inn, and there’s a flurry of movement before a green goblin hand shoves past him with a shining flask enclosed in its claws. “You’re beautiful,” she coos. “Look at you, Caleb. Stunning. A real ladykiller.”

He looks at his reflection in the flask and sees that she’s found flowers that bring out the blue of his eyes. Perched over his shoulder she looks gleeful, ecstatic; he can see every one of her stained yellow teeth when she grins. Her eyes crinkle up. He doesn’t remember if they’ve always done that – if he said funny things when he was a child and she laughed and her eyes crinkled up just like that. He doesn’t remember that at all.

“If I look beautiful,” he says, “it’s only because of you.”

“No,” she says. “No no no. You’ve _always_ been beautiful. You’re just very smelly, so no one looks long enough.” She presses a dry kiss to his cheek and hops back behind him onto the bed. “You should go show Jester how nice your flowers look, I think she’d _really_ like them.”

Caleb’s cheek stings with a lifetime of wanting and missing and being alone. He lies down on his stomach, folds his arms underneath him, looks at his mama. “I want to stay here,” he says. “With you.”

“Don’t be silly,” she says, but she’s smiling. She flops over so she’s mirroring him, and reaches forward a finger to boop his nose. “You can’t deprive the world of my masterpiece.”

“I absolutely can,” he says. With care he tugs one single flower free and tucks it behind her ear. The colors clash terribly with her skin; the flower is already going limp, he loves her. He adores her. Short and spiky and dangerous and clever and terribly, terribly lonely – lonely the way he is. The hole in her heart that matches the hole in his heart exactly.

She plucks the flower from behind her ear and eats it, cheerily. “You’re very welcome,” he says, and when she laughs it sounds like a crossbow firing.

* * *

There’s a moment, where Caleb’s mama and Beau are sitting with Caleb in the inn. Where they are all sitting together. And Caleb turns to his mama and says: _Would you be willing to leave with me tomorrow, if I asked you to?_ And Caleb’s mama says _be a clever boy—_

 _—_ well, no, she says _Absolutely. Right away. Whatever you want_. And her voice is different, and her face is different, but it means the same thing, Luke knows it means the same thing—

—and. And and and. And Beau wants Caleb to tell his story, so that she can have it, and Caleb could give it to her; he could say _my mama died when I was small and my papa was making something for the mages and the army and he wouldn’t tell me what and one day this man came into my papa’s workshop and bent down to look at me and said that if my father was this valuable then I must be – I must – and I was, that’s the problem, I absolutely was, so he took me away, he used my papa and he used me and he broke me into pieces, me and Astrid and Eodwulf, and I kept thinking that if my mama hadn’t died – I kept thinking that if she could have saved me – and my papa – and—_

—and and and and and he could tell them, both of them, Beau but mostly his mama, he could say _I just wanted to go back and keep you safe, and keep me safe, and keep Papa safe, and also keep the rest of the world safe but that doesn’t mean anything to me really_. He could lean forward and grab his mama’s goblin hands in his hands and promise to change her back. He could promise to fix everything.

But he won’t.

 _I am going to tell you the story,_ he says – soft, quiet – _of how I murdered my mother and father._

 _Oh_ , says Caleb’s mama. She reaches out and puts her hand on Caleb’s hand, and Caleb looks at her, and Caleb lies.

* * *

Caleb lies a lot, actually. He lies just by being Caleb. He lies to his mama and he lies to all of his mama’s friends – even when they become his friends, he lies. The only comfort is that his mama is lying with him. She talks about the goblins like she wasn’t ever scared of them, like she didn’t ever hate them, like she didn’t wake up coughing water and mud on a riverbank (and Caleb knows and Caleb saw and Caleb dragged her up from the water and Caleb made that hole in the earth in the goblin den for Luke and Caleb’s papa to climb through and Caleb followed his mama from town to town to town, killing the guards who tried to hurt her, sending Frumpkin to bring her thief’s tools back to her, watching and waiting for the best time to step forward and say his name, which isn’t Caleb, because he wasn’t Caleb then) and rolling her goblin eyes in her goblin skull and screaming. She drinks like a fish, and that is lying. She always says _Caleb_ when she looks at Caleb, and never anyone else’s name, and that is lying too.

* * *

Eventually, they go to Felderwin.

* * *

Before that:

They sit on the deck of a ship in the middle of the sea. The sun is setting. Caleb’s mama has put her mind to draining her undrainable flask; the only sound is her throat working, pulsing like a heartbeat.

“Careful,” Caleb says.

“Fuck you.”

“You don’t need to do that,” Caleb says. “I am not saying it isn’t okay to be scared. Just maybe don’t be scared enough to get sloshed in the middle of the open ocean.”

“Oh my god,” says his mama, “we’re in the middle of the ocean.” She drinks. _I know_ , Caleb wants to tell her, _I promise I know, I promise I won’t let you drown, I would burn up the whole ocean before I let you drown_ , but he’s told his mama the lie knitted into the center of Caleb Widogast and that means he can’t tell her the truth. Not right now. She already knows that Caleb’s parents burned up in a fire, and if he told her he lost one to water and one to time she wouldn’t know what to make of it at all.

“We’ll be back on land soon,” he says instead. “You have been very brave, you know.”

His mama shrugs a shoulder and keeps drinking.

“I mean it,” he says, and she lowers her flask. Her eyes are glazed and feverish moons. She says: “Just because it’s in my name doesn’t make it true.”

“Believe me,” says Caleb, “I know.” He clenches and unclenches his hand, feels the sting of old scars. “I’m just trying to tell you that you were good, so will you accept the compliment. Please.”

“Only for you, Caleb,” she says. Her gaze rolls off towards the ocean; she watches the sun sink into it, and her eyes start to water around the edges. Caleb puts a hand on her shoulder. She blinks and looks at him, and then takes another drink from her flask.

“I hate the fuckin’ water,” she says.

Caleb pushes her head with the flat of his palm so that it rests against his shoulder. “Me too,” he says. “Me too. Soon we will be back on land, though, I promise.”

“ _Please_ ,” she says fervently. She sighs. Her claws pick at the edge of the flask.

 _Maybe then we’ll go to Felderwin_ , he would say, if he knew they were going to go to Felderwin. But he doesn’t know that yet.

* * *

Before that:

He teaches his mama how to use the magic that is in their blood. She whispers in his ear from long distances; she makes tricks and traps and spasms. Caleb is jealous of it. He forgot, after that last lifetime, how to make magic that isn’t for war. It feels like a small and secret joy to watch his mama discover it – to see her learn, for the first time, that it’s possible to make the unreal into something real. He picks her up, he swings her around. _You did it,_ he tells her, _you did it_ , and in the back of his brain he imagines the two of them switching sizes and places:

 _You did it_ , says his mama, in her old voice. The voice that told him he was clever. That voice. She uses that voice, and her eyes crinkle up at the corners, and her smile is white, and her hair is red. Her eyes are – her eyes – but he doesn’t need to remember the color of her eyes to make this image. She swings him around and around. He is young, and his magic is nothing but sparks and joy. And his mama is there. And his mama – she’s there. They’re home.

But when they get to Felderwin, it’s already burned.

But when they get to Felderwin, it’s already burned; his first thought isn’t _home_ but is instead _fault. My fault, my fault, my fault_. He wasn’t the one who burned the town, he wasn’t the one who ruined everything. But he watches his mama in the ashes, frantic and terrified and furious, three feet tall and drunk and goblin, and he thinks: _my fault_. _My fault_. _Mine_.

* * *

Before that:

Jester’s mother watching Jester with her eyes all full of light; the smell of the sea; Caleb almost dying; Caleb’s mama almost dying; Fjord and Yasha unloading their dead; Molly; Hupperdook, and Caleb saying the wrong name but not the wrongest of wrong names; the ocean and the stars and the weight of Caleb’s mama sitting on his shoulders; the fire; a graveyard covered in moss and Jester and Fjord and Yasha and Molly gone and Caleb’s heart drumming urgent and nauseous in his throat _not her not her not her not her don’t let it be her don’t take her please not her not her not her_ ; using the surge of his magic to persuade his mother to leap into the water that drowned her; Caduceus drinking tea made from the dead; Trent Ikithon passing by unknowing because there is no Caleb, there has never been a Caleb, there is only a Luke and he is still so young and still in Felderwin and the only Caleb here is a ghost; Nila holding her son and weeping; the dragon; the city on fire the ship on fire the streets on fire the bones; Caleb shaking the dust out of his lie and unrolling it in front of everyone, checking to see if it’s threadbare yet.

It isn’t threadbare yet. It holds the weight. They go to Felderwin like it’s nothing; it isn’t nothing. Caleb watches his mama. His mama watches the dust, and drinks too much, and shakes.

* * *

And she’s running past the ashes, towards Old Edith’s house, and magic tingles on the roof of Caleb’s mouth – and then his mama is Veth again, her hair the exact same color as his own.

He has her eyes.

How had he forgotten that?

How could he have forgotten that her eyes are blue?

He can’t make up for it. He can’t undo it. All he can do is watch her back, the way it’s turned to him. He memorizes the soft curves of her in seconds. The way the dimpled flesh of her elbows puffs when she knocks on the door; the sound of her raspless voice, the way she twists together her clawless hands. Luke’s mama Veth. Luke’s mama Veth crouching down when her son Luke comes to the door, arms lacking scars, voice lacking accent. His hair is still brown. His eyes are the exact right shade of blue, there and gone again as he blinks.

Luke watches Luke watch Veth, who is his mama. _Stupid_ , he thinks to himself. _Don’t be scared of her, don’t waste time, let her hug you—_ but it’s too late, always, and the boy whose name is Luke does not hug his mama. He barely even looks at her, like looking at her is something he can afford to lose. He just turns away. He turns away, and leaves her there, and goes back inside. He doesn’t even see himself watching him go.

Luke is gone and then Luke’s mama is gone. She has melted away, but she is still there. Her green ears are drooping towards the dirt and her green hands are splayed open, empty and waiting. This is the moment where Luke could tell her everything. It is exactly that moment, except for how it isn’t.

* * *

In the quiet nighttime streets: Caleb’s mama is drunk, and he is carrying her back to their room. She weighs very little in his arms; she is porcelain and nothing, a feather’s weight. Her eyes flicker under her half-closed eyelids. She is drunk enough to be drowning. More drunk than normal – whatever “normal” is, these days.

“Caleb,” she says. “Caaaay-leb.”

He looks down at her and swallows in his dry mouth, carefully, so he doesn’t say the wrong name. “Hello,” he says instead.

“Caleb,” she says again.

“Hello,” he says again, helplessly.

She reaches up a hand and cups his face. “I can’t wait,” she says to him, “I can’t wait for, I can’t wait. It’s going to be so exciting. They’ll love you. I’ll make them love you.”

“Okay,” Caleb says. He kicks open the inn door with one boot and carries his mama inside, up the stairs, towards their cramped and shitty little room. Frumpkin twines around his feet comfortingly as he goes. The hallway is dark, warm; it smells like cozy wood and presses close against his shoulders. Caleb’s mama stirs drowsily in his arms. She tucks himself closer to his chest, burbles something unintelligible. He feels the dry thrum of her frantic heart.

They enter the room. Caleb makes one small globe of light, uses its dreamy glow put his mama to bed. He pulls the covers tight around her sharpened collarbones. Usually she sleeps on the floor, if left to her own devices; he hates it, though. He hates it. He tucks her into bed. She watches him through her heavy-lidded golden eyes.

“I love you,” she slurs, looking two inches to his right. “So much.”

“I love you too, mama.” His voice sounds like a bird, dying. He brushes his hand over her hair, he tucks a greasy green hank of it behind her greasy green ear.

“Not your mama,” she sighs, and her eyes flutter closed.

“I know,” Luke says. He sits down on the floor next to her and keeps petting her hair, listening to her breath whistle as she dreams.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, hold, hold, hold, hold me close  
> I've never been this far from home  
> Hold, hold, hold, hold me close
> 
> He sleeps alone  
> He needs no army where he's headed  
> 'Cause he knows  
> That they're just ghosts  
> And they can't hurt him if he can't see them, oh  
> And I may go  
> To places I have never been to  
> Just to find  
> The deepest desires in my mind
> 
> And one last chance  
> To make sense  
> Of what has long escaped us  
> He sleeps alone  
> I sleep alone  
> \--"Sleep Alone," Two Door Cinema Club
> 
> ...preferably the live acoustic version, if I can specify. Anyways! Thanks for reading. Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


End file.
